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Review Summary

The huge container ships and tankers that cross the world’s oceans are crucial to the functioning of the global consumer economy, and yet they are also curiously marginal to our perception of the world. Many of us take for granted the goods they transport, and perhaps we think about how those goods reached us only when we fly over a major port city and catch sight of maritime giants docked under the cranes in the harbor. Where do those ships go when they have outlasted their usefulness? That strange, fascinating question is at the heart of “Iron Crows,” a startlingly beautiful documentary by Bong-Nam Park that is also devastatingly sad. Mr. Park, a South Korean filmmaker armed with a high-definition digital camera, a knack for striking visual compositions and a deep reservoir of human sympathy, spent months with a group of shipbreakers in Chittagong, a city in Bangladesh where many of the world’s largest vessels are taken apart, their fixtures sold off and their bodies cut into scrap metal. The workers, men and teenagers from impoverished rural villages, wade across tidal mudflats toward the grounded ships and painstakingly dismantle them with blowtorches, grappling hooks, winches and hammers. The work is dangerous, and the pay is low, but the shipbreakers display a kind of stoical, weather-beaten camaraderie that will be familiar to fans of reality shows about tough guys doing hazardous jobs. — A. O. Scott